I use old laptops as web servers at school. However, they really aren’t built to be running continuously; I have disk problems on both of my old laptops. Amazon Web Services offer a free usage tier of EC2 cloud service for 1 year. After the 1 year, the micro instance cost about $.02/hr, which is still pretty cheap. I sign up for an account with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), started an instance, installed the ami-3e02f257 AMI, downloaded the private key, and the ball started to roll. Before you can ssh to your server, you have to set up the firewall from the management console of EC2 to open port 22 per this post. To log in and set up, I had to download the private key (PEM) that amazon generated and logged in as the user ubuntu (root is not allowed for my chosen AMI; this is the default user per the AMI):